Here is the ‘management tent’ of the circus authorities. It is a few hours before show time at the circus’s latest stop, in the Purani Mandi of Bhakkar. Here, the skies scowl with heavily furrowed rain clouds and the wind hisses, making the tent snap around us.
And here are the cogs of the state’s machinery, each clutching small chits stamped with the seal of a bureaucrat’s office and adorned with an order to provide the bearer with free entry. Here are the circus’s three managers, treating the chits with utter contempt, the ancient one amongst them, liberally spraying obscenities, each more corrosive than the last as the hastily scribbled missives from high-up are presented before him. Here is the corruption and nepotism that we complain is causing our country to go to the dogs, the corruption that we never have to truly experience.
Here is Sheikh Salahuddin, a man who runs one-man political movements in his private time, scrawling slogans on his house walls which raise the suspicions of the local police and cause them to inquire about him at odd hours of the night. He is one of the few people involved in this circus who was educated in a school as well, and he describes the circus as a village, a tribe, a country and an idea at various times. He isn’t wrong about any of those descriptions.
Here he is telling us how Lucky Irani is one of the country’s biggest taxpayers. How it refuses to bribe and barter, how it follows the letter of the law in applying for its NOCs, and how every single district the circus visits seems to have the same DCO, DPO, SHOs. How each of these arms of the state demur and refuse permissions, claiming the circus would get bombed and their necks would be on the line. How they pass the buck from one office to another, from one babu to another.
And then, once the elusive permission arrives, how each of these babus send their chotas, and the chotay’s aziz, and the chotay’s aziz’s humsaye with unauthorized and prominently stamped chits, demanding free tickets. Free tickets on which the Excise Department still collects taxes, as well as insisting that the managers accommodate thirty women for free entry, all of whom are married to various functionaries stationed along the many rungs of the Excise Department ladder. No wonder the ancient manager screams bloody murder.
Here is Salahuddin taking us on a tour of the circus grounds, telling us that no matter how much the authorities stall and exploit and undermine, the reason the circus keeps going is because nothing can never stop the people from coming to the Lucky Irani Circus. I wonder whether this boast is merely a prerequisite for all circus folk all over the world, but the sight of the local DCO’s driver’s son almost breaking into tears when he realizes that his sifarish won’t come through, or the gaggle of children ogling at freak-of-nature animals is a timely reminder that Salahuddin might not be wrong.
Here is Mian Rashid Farzand. Here he is in his grey suit and luscious, waist-length ponytail, holding court in his gaily decorated tent, which accommodates two A/Cs, a fridge and a microwave. I would’ve mentioned the cable-ready TV, but almost every tent here seemed to have one of those.
Here is Mian Sahab telling us what it means to own a circus. Here he is delivering a hagiographic recollection of his father - the founder of the circus and a man who serves as the spiritual patriarch of the traditionalist society that is this circus. Here he is telling us how the traveling circus had just about died out the world over almost half a century ago - almost the same time this very circus was founded. Here he is relishing the pride he feels to be the only circus from Asia invited to global meets and performances, a circus which has traveled the world, even performing in the Holy cities of Makkah and Medina.
Here he is explaining why his circus did not go the way of the stage show and the film - art forms which are tawdry shadows of their former selves, crippled by the censors, destroyed by the race to the bottom-line. His explanation largely involves concepts like honor and the need to protect it, but then in one fell swoop, he gives a more institutional cause for why the circus came about, and why - in the age of depressions and declines and VCDs and CGIs and suicide vests and Ishq-e-Mamnoos and hysterical moral outrages - the circus still persists.
“We are not copying the cinema or the theater. We are promoters of the funoon-e-latif, the promoters of the culture of the mela, the rakhs held to the thap-thap of the dhol, the miles-long markets selling jalebiyan and katlamay(?), the dances of the khusras and the people celebrating them as they seated them indolis, the nach of the horses bedecked with ghungroos, the wrestling bouts of the pehelwans; that’s the culture we seek to preserve and promote.”
Here are the performers, sitting inside small tents clouded with smoke from the fires they run, their belongings and children strewn across in a manner immediately cozy and comforting. Here they are, each of them, saying how the applause is what they work for. Here they are expressing how they don’t know of a life beyond the circus, how they have no pensions or futures, and how all they really want and cherish are the memories they make here.
“Yeh circus hum hain, aur hum yeh circus hain.”
Here is the flying couple Javed and Naheed, cradling their baby daughter, preparing for their trapeze act. Here they are, explaining how the audience transposes its desire for risk on them, translating their performances as the culmination of their own fantasies. Like the rest, they insist they live for the applause, but a few minutes later, I wonder whether the couple shares a joy even greater than that. The thought strikes me as I notice the dazzling smiles on their faces seconds after they dive with balletic grace from their swings high above onto the net below. Perhaps the thrill of realising the romantic desire to fly, without any aids or machines, only using their own bodies is a satisfaction that they don’t know how to articulate with words.
Here is the clown Haji Nowsher, a student of Munawwar Zareef, sporting a faded tied across his fleshy, shirtless neck, looking at me with mournful eyes, talking about the craft of comedy. Here he is explaining how comedy works when the performer is laden with worries and troubles, how the performance temporarily absolves existential terrors, and how its becoming harder to make people laugh.
Here is the lion trainer, Ghulam Mohammad, who is a man of few words and fewer details. Even his story of how he almost lost an arm while fighting a lion on the Tariq Aziz show is bereft of emotion. His passivity does makes sense later, when in the show’s final act he coaxes two ferocious and decidedly untamed lions through rings of fire and across parallel tightropes, his face fixed in a tight grin as the lions swipe giant paws at him and bellow roars that emerge as plumes of smoke in the frigid night air. Who can afford smiles for journalists when a bout with the Masters of the Jungle beckons?
Here is the love story that beguiles all who come to hear of it. Here is Maria, aka Masha, a Siberian gymnast who does an intensely rhythmic floor routine to the sounds of a Bollywood number, living with her gymnast mother and the man she loves, a man who my eyes had pigeonholed as a muscle-laden, mehndi-haired Pakistani subaltern, but a man in whom Maria saw much more. The two fell in love trying to learn each other’s languages and the life of the circus, and despite the dozens of Indecent Proposals Maria receives each day, they never let anything come between them. Except perhaps their dog Filia, the only member of the family who doesn’t understand Urdu, and must only be spoken to in Russian.
Here are Mohammad Iqbal and his wife, who train the various flying, juggling, jumping, gyrating troupes. The regal Iqbal sahib was once a stunt double, though his visage suggests that he should have been playing authoritative emperors and benevolent, wise villains. Here he is, detailing what makes him feel this life, with its constant moving and uprooting and rebuilding, is worth it. He tells me how once while praying at Masjid-e-Nabvi, he was approached by some fans of his performances. As he put it, ‘when you get izzat even at his darbar, what more can you ask for?’ Here is his wife – Mrs. Iqbal aka Baji Guddo, who trains all the women in the circus, and who agrees with me when I describe her husband and her as proxy-parents for the performers. She insists that there can’t be any other way for her to treat them. This is their family.
Here then, is the culture that we don’t quite know how to recognize any more. A culture which is comfortable with hijras flashing their cleavage in between breaks at the maut ka kunwa, their expertise lying in the ability to lock eyes with the people ogling from above - a culture which is just as comfortable for the same hijras to don their veils and slink away when the azaan starts without tut-tutting about hypocrisy.
Here is a culture where the wife offers to leave the tent when men enter, in deference of tradition. Traditions that she manages to bestraddle comfortably and without shame, even as she remains dressed in the purple sequins she was wearing to ride the smallest cycle ever driven on a tightrope in front of 400 people a few moments ago.
Here is a culture that is comfortable with dance and music, seeing them not as sins, but perhaps as a balance between temptation and celebration. Here is a culture that doesn’t measure faith in clothes and hair, and doesn’t replace spirituality with sterile sanctity.
Here is a culture that the unwashed, unkempt, uncouth, uncultured, uneducated live by. Here are the sights and sounds that entrance them, here are the ideas and desires that they harbor within their dreams.
Of course, here is also a tradition-bound, patriarchal culture with largely static hierarchies. This is not some progressive, liberal alternative to what we see now, and nor should it be seen as such.
Here then, is the Lucky Irani Circus, the purveyor of joys and fantasies, that lives in a Pakistan truer than the one you and I see.
The writer is a freelance writer and filmmaker.
